Doncaster Live 2007
!_ARCHIVE POST
First published August 2007 in
Doncaster Live Magazine.
By:
Adam Irwin, Ruth Offord and Richard Cook
Attention! Let’s get this clear from the start. Anyone looking for informative and insightful commentary about the Doncaster Live Festival, look away now. You can’t expect us to spend 12 hours in the vicinity of all the pubs in Doncaster market and not get ridiculously sloshed. As we sit down to write this on the Monday after the festival, our recollections of the weekend are somewhat hazy, and we’ve just made the discovery that half of our notes have disappeared. This then, is a very fractured, almost certainly made up in places, bluffers guide to Doncaster Live 2007.
It all starts sedately enough. We head to Vintage Rock Bar to enjoy an afternoon of gentle acoustic performers, before the main stage frivolities to come later. However, it’s 1.30pm, the time scheduled for the first act and the only sign of life in Vintage Rock Bar is a barmaid, and a handful of quiet drinkers. There are no acoustic guitars, and no recognisable faces. The place quickly starts to fill up though, and only a little later than expected we have our first act.
Guy Honeymoon
“We have seen the future of rock n’ roll, and his name is Guy Honeymoon”. Mr Honeymoon pleaded us to put that in the review before his set, so there you go Guy, that’s a few beers you owe us. He may not be the future of rock n’ roll as we know it, but he knows how to knock out a tune. Kicking off with old favourite ‘Wrong Side of the Tracks’, he doesn’t let either us or himself pause for breath, racing through his set at 100mph. Where Guy succeeds is in melding his love of Red Kross-esque powerpop with old school country, the results giving us a taste of something a little different to your normal hum-drum singer/songwriters.
This is the first time we’ve seen John Fontanelle do his solo thing, and this afternoon he’s in fine form. The quirky, lo-fi indie pop of his band The Fontanelles translates brilliantly to just voice and guitar. The sound for his set isn’t ideal, his voice often getting lost in the mix, and the set is far too brief for our liking, but he’s on to a winning formula and we’ll certainly be making the effort to catch him again. Set highlights? Old Fontanelles tracks ‘DC Soap’ and ‘Ecstasy’, ‘DC Soap’ sounding particularly fine.
John Fell
The beer is flowing freely now, despite our protestations that we’re working and have to pace ourselves (honest). Things are starting to get a bit hazy, but next up, if memory serves correct, is Ryan Lightfoot, formerly of Libawalks. Whereas John Fontanelle struggled to get his voice heard at times, Ryan has the opposite problem, with his vocals clear as a bell but the guitar almost non-existent above the chatter of the crowd. From what we can make out, it’s nice inoffensive pop with a summery, 60s’ish vibe. Not bad, but nothing to get overly excited about either.
After Ryan has finished, we decide to take a break and get some food to soak up the alcohol. Before we go, we catch a couple of songs by a gentleman calling himself ‘The Beast’. He must be well known because the crowd in Vintage Rock bar visibly swells as he begins his first track. The songs we hear are grungy, blues based numbers, with ‘The Beast’s vocals a Joe Cocker-esque growl. Obviously a talented chap, but we’re hungry! After a quick trip to KFC, and a detour via Wetherspoons for a quick whisky, we head back to Vintage Rock Bar and The Beast is still playing! We see him bring out a harmonica for one song with more than a passable resemblance to prime Bob Dylan.
